French TCM (Turner Classic Movies) are showing Grand Prix roughly every other day over the coming 10 days, in both french and english. I'd never seen the movie and landed on it by accident tonight -- the goosebumps haven't quite gone yet.

French TCM don't seem to have the same programme as UK TCM, so the following schedule may only apply to viewers in France and French-speaking Switzerland :

Back in 1966 during my own racing experience I went to the Grand Prix movie in Vancouver with a gang of sports car club members. Of course, we were all instant critics afterwards but still appreciated the fact that the interest in racing was growing. A simple analogy would be surfers right on the crest of a wave.
At the movie a 9 x 12 16-page booklet was available for sale for $1.00. I bought one. It was produced by MGM and contained many pictures of the actors, drivers (Chris Amon (I think) included with cameras taped to his helmet), filming, circuit diagrams of Nurburgring-Monza-Brands Hatch-SPA-Zandvoort-Rheims-Mexico City-Watkins Glen-Monaco-Clermont Ferrand, movie scenes, bxw photos behind the scenes etc. I truly wish I had bought a baker's dozen of these booklets at the time.
One very important quote in this booklet is from Jim Clark:
"It is satisfaction, it is disappointment, it is triumph, it is noise, it is color, it is people. For the driver each race is a new adventure."
Jim Clark
World Champion '63, '65

There's more in this book you may want to read such as Circuit Sayings, names of drivers and backgrounds. Just ask.

Originally posted by Magee At the movie a 9 x 12 16-page booklet was available for sale for $1.00. I bought one. It was produced by MGM and contained many pictures of the actors, drivers (Chris Amon (I think) included with cameras taped to his helmet), filming, circuit diagrams of Nurburgring-Monza-Brands Hatch-SPA-Zandvoort-Rheims-Mexico City-Watkins Glen-Monaco-Clermont Ferrand, movie scenes, bxw photos behind the scenes etc.

I still have mine as well Michael. As a budding enthusiast at the time, I must have read that booklet a thousand times.

In the biography of Jim Russell, it mentions that one of the Jim Russell Racing School cars had to be lengthened for James Garner because of his height.

Has anybody ever heard of a surviving Lotus 20 or 22 with an unusually long chassis?

It may be that it was written-off during the making of the film; which may be why in the film Garner later drives a 'Yamura' faked-up Lotus 25 - but then if he had trouble getting in a 20/22, how on earth did he fit into a 25, which was designed around the compact form of Jim Clark?

Roger Clark wrote:
"Bonnier started practice in a BRM engined car but the engine blew up early on. He changed to a Climax car which he raced."

------------------------------------------------------

There's a new book out, a large-format photo-history of every car in every WC GP since 1950, by Simon Arron and Mark Hughes (funny, I thought he was a football manager).

While there are a couple of transposed photos, overall it is excellent, and there are pictures of cars I have never seen before. One is of Bonnier in a Brabham at the British GP at Brands, a plain dark blue (no noseband) Climax-engined car - I wonder if it was the same car he drove for Rob Walker in 1965.

In the first article it mentions that they had bought six real F1 1.5 litre cars for filming; I guess that would be Lotus 25/33s R6 and R9, maybe two Brabhams (one BRM and one Climax), and a real BRM P261 that was used for close-ups like the one of Stoddart in the pits at Brands (perhaps DCN can confirm that from his research for the eagerly-awaited 'BRM Vol 3 ;) )..........but that's only five.

But if you count the hired Lotus 25's R7 & R8 and a Cooper used for the interior shot of Aron trying the Yamura for size in a workshop (filmed at Cooper's?), thats's eight.

In one of the articles, it mentions drivers from 1966 who were subsequently killed in crashes; but omits Mike Spence, who was one of the main stand-in drivers according to James Garner (and not just in the Parnell Lotus 25/33 'Percy', painted white, then red, then white again so often it took on a pink tinge!).

It mentions a link to a James Garner article, but I can't get that one to work.

While there are a couple of transposed photos, overall it is excellent, and there are pictures of cars I have never seen before. One is of Bonnier in a Brabham at the British GP at Brands, a plain dark blue (no noseband) Climax-engined car - I wonder if it was the same car he drove for Rob Walker in 1965.

Paul Mackness

According to "The Formula 1 Record Book", at Brands Bonnier practiced in the Walker Cooper 66 which had a Climax engine, but raced in the BRM engined Brabham BT11.

In 1965 (and late 64) Bonnier drove a Climax engined BT7, which Jack Brabham had used up to (but not including) Austria .

3 minutes of stock footage on the "making of grand prix" then 60 minutes of crap like stuntcar drivers, indy 500 winners and taffy von trips crashing at Monza WTF?

Agreed.

The actual "making of" film is quite fun, but the rest of the DVD is appalling. The Le Mans/Grand Prix section features very graphic footage of Von Trips at Monza '61, Bandini at Monaco '67, and Le Mans 1955.

I wish I hadn't bought it, as no doubt the "making of" feature will be on the DVD of the film itself, if it ever appears.

.................and to bring this thread full circle, I have found absolutely NO out-takes from the shooting of this film. And especially now that Mr.Frankenheimer is no longer with us, that's probably about it for my initial idea.

I thought the first driver looks like Bandini, but it seemed unlikely that Ferrari would have let him drive for MGM at Monaco because OMF was reserving judgement on the film; he didn’t start to co-operate until after Monaco, when he had seen the footage shot there.

Roger,
the real drivers did indeed stand in during filming using the fake F1’s. One of the articles mentioned in links above shows pictures of Graham Hill in a fake BRM P261 at Clermont-Ferrand, with onboard camera, but I don’t think they used that footage, and it mentions that Graham didn’t do much driving, but Jochen Rindt did. In Motor Sport in about 1968, DSJ reported buying a souvenir set of F1 colour prints at a GP and finding stills from the film mixed in with genuine shots, and mostly involving Rindt in various helmets and cars.

Talking of films, the other night ‘The Fast Lady’ was on TV; briefly, Stanley Baxter buys a 3-litre Bentley from Leslie Phillips (although he can’t drive) in order to win Julie Christie against the wishes of her father, and it includes a sequence where the hero dreams of racing at Silverstone.

We see a few seconds of the 1962 International Trophy, with Masten Gregory in a UDT Lotus 24 V8 dicing with Trevor Taylor in a Lotus 24 ‘4’; then there are back-projection close-up shots of Surtees and Graham Hill, and some stunt driving at Silverstone with the Bentley and four F1’s which appear to be a Yeoman-Credit Cooper driven by Surtees, a light blue BRM P57 driven by a tall chap in a white helmet (Jack Lewis?), and two Lotus 18/21’s, one of them black with white wheels (Tony Shelley?). Raymond Baxter is seen doing an animated commentary, and when Our Hero crashes after winning the race John Bolster rushes up to him to get his last words!

Actually the second of the photo's reveals that some of what we think of as modern cutting-edge technology actually originated in the Swinging Sixties.

That chap is obviously riding the first incarnation or technology demonstrater of the Stealth Bicycle, the XST (Xperimental Stealth Tandem). This was an idea that originally was proposed for use by the Home Guard in WW2 as a way a creeping up unseen on enemy tanks in order to get within range of the primitive F**t Bomb that had been issued as a stopgap weapon - the thinking behind it was that the crew would open the hatch in order to say "Mein Gott, vat is dat awful schtinken, und who is dat guy floating in der mid-air?" and Corporal Jones would then give them the old cold steel. Sadly the technology was immature, and the bicycle corps was in any case rapidly superceded by more modern methods of warfare.

The advent of widely available vindaloo curries from the proliferation of Asian restaurants in the 60's led to a reappraisal of the possibilities, and further tests were carried out using the XST in conjunction with the new SBD Bomb, as seen in the picture; the intrepid test-pilot having been forced to put his ski-lid on back-to-front so that the potential enemy wouldn't see the tears coming from his eyes and mistake it as a sign of weakness . However there was an unexpected drawback when the new-fangled Nomex balaclava was found to be proof against the most pungent and fiery of emanations, and the whole programme sank from public view into the world of Black Projects, where it is rumoured that multi-million dollar budgets are still being spent on secret programmes tested in the farthest reaches of the Nevada desert where even the most sensitive of noses cannot be offended. Indeed it is a little-known fact the strange designation of the F117 Stealth Fighter refers to the factor of magnitude of its weapon load over the worst bottom-burp previously known to man - by a misunderstanding it has become known in the world's press as the Nighthawk whereas in USAF parlance it is more correctly the Sh***hawk.

OK, so it's a dull afternoon here; but does anyone know who that bloke talking to JF is?

Coincidentally, a couple of days ago I came across a book of old newspaper cuttings I hadn't seen for years. Here's one of them:

The atmosphere on the bridge of the marine and scientific research ship Columbus Iselin was far from pure one night as the ship sailed off the Florida coast.

For the master of the 280 gross ton vessel was suffering from a bout of flatulence. And the resulting odours were said to have been so offensive that the master and the watchkeeper had to evacuate the 'relatively confined' wheelhouse to seek fresh air on the bridge wings.

In the ensuing distraction the 24 year old research ship - owned by the University of Miami - ran aground on a coral reef in the Florida Keys some 20 miles east of Key West.

Just remembered that there was a photo-article in Motor Sport a couple of years ago; it showed the pic of Garner in the Lotus 25 Yamura in the Cooper works - by golly, he must have had slim hips to get into it, and presumably stuck a long way out, being about 6'2" IIRC.

There was also a pic of a genuine BRM P261 being used for filming, as with the picture Ray posted for me of Stoddard and Jeff Jordan in the pits at Brands. In Tony Rudd's 'It Was Fun!' he mentions a spoof on MGM when they were supposedly sold the cars by some mechanic, even though BRM were still racing them pending the arrival of the H16; but did MGM buy, or just hire/borrow the P261s? DCN?

I'll have to watch it again to see if any genuine P261s were used in action shots, or only faked-up ones.

I have a doubt about the accident between Stodart and Aron during the Monaco Grand Prix. The action seems so real that it makes me wonder if the accident really happened. Or was it just fiction. If this was the case, who provided the cars to film the crash? I know that Ascari´s Lancia dived into the sea in the 1955 Monaco GP (besides, this was such a unique fate, as he was marked to death four days later in Monza), but I have no record of a similar accident during the sixties (other than Bandini´s fatal crash in 1967).

I remember seeing the various takes of this scene in the Alan Whicker documentary on TV years ago.

They did it in three sections; first, the cars apparently touching and spinning at the entry to the chicane, which was filmed with the Lotus 20/22 fakes driven by American stunt drivers (the close-up of the wheels touching could have been shot anywhere anytime). They had several takes before it looked genuine, and not like cars deliberately swerving into the barriers.

Then they brought on the secret weapon, a compressed-gas cannon nicknamed 'Big Blow', which could be attached to a fitting on the rear of the gearbox (or where the gearbox would be, since I think they tended to remove engines and gearboxes where possible). First they fired the Stoddart car towards the cliff face, having several goes at it until they had a take where it slid along the cliff without turning over (and I think they filmed the landing with a stuntman in the car by just dropping it manually off some strawbales).

By this time they were getting short of bodywork. Finally they fired a car into the harbour, which I think they got with one take (would have been a bit time-consuming to have to keep craning it out of the harbour!). If you see a still or slo-mo this bit in the film, you can see that the body on this car has a white noseband when it goes into the harbour, and it doesn't appear to have an engine.

'Big Blow' was also used to shoot the 'Sarti Ferrari' over the banking at Monza in the climactic race, though the picture on this page looks as if it hit the barrier backwards, which is strange since there is no sign that Big Blow was attached to the front for this shot.

There's a recreation of Jim Clark's Zandvoort 1966 pit-stop where Chapman shielded him from steam with a clipboard, featuring Yamura and Aron, but I don't seem to remember that being used in the movie.

I watched my video yet again at the weekend, and noticed a few more points.

When Sarti and Fangio enter the party after the Monaco GP, Scarfiotti is just behind them and Bandini appears too. Both Ginther and Gurney are at the drivers' meeting at Spa, but only Ginther(and McLaren and Rindt) speak. Jo Schlesser is glimpsed a couple of times. When Aron is being a TV reporter at Clermont Ferrand, it is indeed Chris Amon (in a dark blue helmet) to whom he says 'Hello Chris'.

When Barlini is pushed onto the grid at Brands, his 'Ferrari' is a Brabham-Climax (and there is a picture of him sitting on the same car in one of the retrospective articles [in Sports Car Illustrated IIRC]; but there is also a glimpse in the film of Bonnier in the dark-blue Brabham without fake exhausts ).

From the in-car shots of Sarti catching and passing the field at Monza, among the faked cars he passed was at least one unmodified green-and-yellow Lotus 25.

In the final battle between Aron and Stoddard, sometimes Stoddard is driving a fake H16, but in other shots it appears to be a genuine BRM P261............but modified to look like an H16 with fake exhausts!

In the Yamura factory scene shot inside the Cooper works, there are at least five spare nosecones stood up; what with all the fake Eagles, Lotus 43s, et al, Jim Russell must have been VERY busy in the GRP shop. I wonder what happened to them all.

In a couple of race scenes looking back from Aron, Jochen Rindt is mentioned, and there does appear to be a genuine 1.5L Cooper following (turned-up nose, inboard front springs).

We do see helicopter shots of Bondurant's BRM at Spa in both blue (practise) and white (race).

In one split-screen head-on shot of the four central characters at Zandvoort, Aron's Yamura has a spoiler on the engine cover, just like in that picture of McLaren in the real car that was discussed a few weeks ago.

Just also remembered, further to previous threads that mention how much we see of Bernard Cahier in the film, at the Spa drivers' meeting and also somewhere else, possibly the Monaco party, we see and hear Paul Frere............perhaps he too was doing some consultancy work for Frankenheimer.

And at Monza in practise, when Sarti is waiting for his car to arrive he has a shouting-match with the team-manager who is ...............Eugenio Dragoni playing himself (both in person and character)..........yes, the t**t who pushed Surtees into leaving Ferrari.

And when Barlini comes into the pits and commiserates with Sarti, he appears to be driving a real Ferrari 312 with 24-valve engine; odd, because all three Ferrari 312s had the 36-valve engine for the GP. Maybe some scenes were filmed at Monza some time before the race, and before the cars were updated.

The book Motor Racing Team Colours & Markings by John Baxter describes Team Chamaco Collect colours as:

Connaught Green (ICI paint reference P030-3302) with 3 inch White band on nose between the headlamps. Name "TEAM CHAMACO COLLECT" in White on each side of the body forward of the doors. Wheels - Silver. In the 1966 Grand Prix events Bondurant's BRM was painted Connaught Green and carried a fore and aft White stripe.

I own a very large poster from the "Grand Prix" film. This poster was given in the Shell ( I think!) gas stations. It show the belgian GP start in a splendid rear view and it's not the real grid but this one you can view on the movie.
Sorry for my poor english!

I looked through Motor Sport, Motor Racing and Autocar last night to see if there was some line by an oracle such as DSJ saying 'Bondurant in the green (or blue) BRM', but there wasn't.

Looking at that paint reference on a website (which is probably misleading), it's a VERY dark green. I watched again the bits of the movie where we see Bondurant's car (briefly) at the start in Monaco, and then the aerial view from practise at Spa, and it still looks more like blue than green; very like the colour of the blue stripes on his helmet, which I've seen at the FoS. It's certainly very dark; if it's green then it's even darker than the works BRMs.

I also noticed that when Stoddard passes Sarti at Mirabeau to take the lead in the Monaco GP, Sarti is in a Brabham-Climax 'Manetta-Ferrari' rather than a faked Lotus 20, the same Brabham that Barlini drives at Brands; so there must have been three on set in total.

In the on-car footage looking forward at Monaco, shot by Phil Hill in practise in a Lotus 25/R6, we see a Ferrari with Bandini's silver helmet in it. Although the magazines say, or imply, that he was getting in the way, it's noticeable that the Ferrari only pulls away on acceleration, and Hill catches up on braking and through the corners.

Regarding the colour of Bondurant's BRM, Doug Nye in a previous thread said it was the same very dark BRG as the works cars.

But has anyone ever seen a colour photo of one of the other Team Chamaco-Collect cars; they ran a GT40, also a 250LM at Daytona and in South Africa in 1966, and a Lotus 30 that Vic Wilson drove in the UK? Or indeed can anyone remember seeing the original cars?

I've found a couple more pictures of out-takes, which I will try to get scanned for this thread.

One is of Phil Hill/Tim Randolph's Yamura at Monaco, where they wanted a shot of it blowing its engine on the climb up to Massenet...........apparently they decided backfiring was the appropriate noise to accompany the ignition of a smoke flare at the rear of the car, so as it passed the camera a film man fired three blanks from a pistol!

Why did they use the banking at Monza during the film?
The actual race at Monza in 1966, did not use the banked section.
To the best of my knowlege, the banking was used in 1955 & 1956, then again
in 1960 & 1961. For one lap, you were required to use a combination of the oval track
and the actual GP circuit. The sequence was: Start - Curva Grande, to the Lesmos, to
the Variante Ascari(which was Curva de Vialone- then to the Parabolica. When you came
off of the Parabolica, yo had to stay "inside" and you head off to the oval, first the Curva Nord
then of course around to the Curva Sud. Leaving the banking you'd go back to the Start off
to the Curva Grande etc. One lap was over 6 miles.